Evolution's Greatest Error - Progressive International - When PC Meets Reality: A Monkey's Tale From Delhi.

Evolution is a theory that morphed into progressive truth ( inquiry) at the tail end of the Nineteenth Century.  Charles Darwin's observations from the gunwales of HMS Beagle clicked nicely with late Victorian Social Enthusiasm - secular religion.  The Dawn of Evolution broke with the birth of the Do-Gooder .  The fundamental questions that lead to truth were shouted down by parlors full of enthusiastic social theorists armed with Hegel, impatience, steady incomes from factories, tenant farms and royal largess, as well as political power. Artists and scribblers flocked to these parlors in London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and New York to find fortune, fame and force the less gifted to pay attention to them.

Art linked arms with Progressive Pontiffs and soon Emile Zola turned the reading of literature into an autopsy of society. Soon literature became the path to power, in the words of Marxist literary critic Irving Howe, because “it struck me as the easiest major, where I could bullshit the most.”

It is a short jump from the printed page to political power for Progressives - it is a very exclusive Masonic Order.  In no time at all social theory became doctrine and later law.

The first law of the Progressive is Be Contrarian in All Things but Matters of Personal Wealth.  The rich are always bad and only the rich can destroy their evil.  Convicts are always better than jailers.  Working people are great, so long as they do not ride in the same elevators as a Progressive.  Debt makes Wealth. Liberty is fascism. And, so it goes.

Science can mean anything so long as it supports the meme du jour.  Darwin managed all of this by watching monkeys. Let's consider our ring-tailed cousins in Dehli.  You see in Hindi India monkeys are sacred on Tuesdays and Saturdays in honor of the monkey faced Hindu god Hanuman

Now, there are many types, classes and races, if you will, of monkey - langur, rhesus & etc.

The langur is a  grey black-faced fellow  with temperment an old timey Irish Cop.

The rhesus is a pain in the ass.  There are many more Rhesus monkey's than langur monkeys, because the Langur is on the endangered list, because he was so God damned mean, nasty and dangerous. The much more numerous, smaller red-faced Rhesus monkey is scared shitless of the langur.  In the past, langur monkeys were used by Indian Entrepreneurs to patrol neighborhoods plagued by troops, nay regiments of Rhesus cousins.

However, Politically and Environmentally Correct Doctrine afflicted India, no less than it has in Big Gulp NYC, or Rahm's Chicagoland.

India’s rhesus monkeys are derelicts. They regularly steal food, alcohol, glasses, medical equipment, and clothes. They even break into cars.
To combat them, the langur men used to be a common sight around Delhi’s political and diplomatic areas, especially during visits by high-ranking foreign officials.
The problem is, it’s illegal to keep langurs. They are a protected species, and in November 2012, the environment ministry cracked down. The ministry told government departments and agencies that langurs are covered by India’s Wildlife Protection Act, and that people who own, trade or hire out langurs face up to three years in jail. (emphasis my own)

Like the cell-phone in the hands of an SUV & Starbucks armed soccer mom from Naperville, the langur monkey continues to patrol the streets of Delhi.  Statisics from pre-caste polling services, like Paul Simon Institute are used to draw up laws made confound common sense and what was formerly known as Nature.

Langur monkeys do not make great pets, because they huge nasty-tempered brutes, but they make great wonderful riot-control deterent enforcers of mobs of felonious rhesus monkeys.  What would Darwin say?
Probably, ' once the rhesus has fully evolved through  after-school, programs, frees schooling and breakfasts, unchallenged access to government housing, health care and rise in the minimum wage Dehli will have even more rhesus monkeys.'  Instead, the same Government officials who ban the ownership of langurs, hire the outlawed langur leash-holders to illegally do what Nature used to do - the rhesus monkeys out of the neighborhoods.

To cover up the hypocrisy, the Delhi Progressive apply contraceptives to monkey vitals in order to keep down the rhesus breeding:

The NDMC and the Delhi government are taking other measures too. The handful of monkey catchers employed by the council round up about 500 a year with their lassos.
India’s Central Zoo Authority has been working with the National Primate Center in California to reduce the monkey population by using contraceptives left in food and sterilization of captured monkeys. A pilot program is taking place in the northern state of Uttarakhand.
And the NDMC has been negotiating with an Indian company to supply electric shock tape for government buildings. The makers of Avi-Simian Shock Tape, which runs off a simple main socket, claim monkeys and birds receive a small electric shock when touching the aluminum wires in the tape. But for now the monkey population remains in complacent control of New Delhi.

If it is stupid, it is Progressive. 


H/T Sancte Pater

Chicago Media Giggle Up Karen Lewis, Because Toni Preckwinle Wont' ( Can't) Play

Karen Lewis, less than a yard from her Svengali Jesse Sharkey (ISO & CTU) got the giggles shared by our propaganda media!


Chicago's Media (read Editorial Boards) are just giddy over new, scientific polling numbers that show Karen Lewis is also leading over Rahm Emanuel - Toni Preckwinkle holds 55% and the CTU sock-puppet for Socialist Jesse Sharkey with nine point lead - in the soon to be fabulous race to replace Rahm. The Sun Times conducted a poll showing Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Karen Lewis beating the bejazuz out of Mayor Coon Eyes.

Lewis revealed on Monday she already has an unofficial exploratory committee in the works, a chairperson has been named and her camp is working to have a representative in each of the city’s 77 neighborhoods.
Since an Early & Often poll released Sunday put Lewis at a 9-percentage-point advantage over Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Lewis’ phone has been ringing non-stop, she said.
“They’ve been coming from all over the country,” Lewis said in an interview Monday. “Facebook is blowing up. Twitter is blowing up.”

Blowing up like the great puffer fish!

Once again, Chicago sheep are encouraged to make the electoral choice of horse-poop, or manure.



Yep, you can not  beat the joy around the Editorial tables. They are happier than a teen age boy with two fish sticks.

Let's see, vote for Karen and Lewis and Jesse Sharkey becomes mayor; vote for Toni Preckwinkle and Dr. Quentin Young owns Chicago as well as Illinois.

Either way, Chicago fast-tracks to Detroit.

Karen Lewis and Jesse Sharkey ( you get one without the other . . .ever!) want all of us to know that they have Grassroots support!  That means MoveOn Dot Orgasm and Grassroots Illinois Action cranking up the happy!

“Another local group, Grassroots Illinois Action, isn’t backing a particular candidate.
However, field director Abbie Illenberger said the group is building both its member and financial base in hopes to possibly boost the right candidate’s campaign. Illenberger said the group’s work is in the backdrop of Emanuel having $7 million in the bank and having a SuperPAC that has the potential to match that amount. The mayoral election is Feb. 24, 2015.

Now here's the side-splitter, "The ability for regular, working people to run means we have to organize ourselves and do it collectively,” says Abbie Illenberger.

Regular, working people?  Karen? Toni? Alderman Bob Fioretti? \

 Frank from down Maplewood Street works for Streets and Sanitation, Molly who took a leave of abscense from CPS because Tim King's Urban Prep thugs loused up the elementary school she worked at, Jerry the African American copper who drives the wagon in 22 and Dewey the laborer with County are all regular working people.

I am around regular working people 24/7 and they can't stand any of the above mentioned just plain folks.

The same news media that gave America the Barack Obama gum-scraping it now enjoys and paved Chicago's pot-holed streets with 40 Weight Motor oil for Rahm's Carpet-bagging tenure as Mayor is giggling giddily to make two more mediocrities Chicago's Chief Executives!

Now that' old news.

I'm Hearing 'Gun Violence' is Bad . . .Everything Else is Just Dandy!

I heard the Chicago Police boss say that 17 deaths and 82 bullet mutilations is just unacceptable. He immediately shifted blame from shooters holding hand guns to his people with a John Deweyesque lab lesson, “We're square-rooting* nine ways from Sunday what is it that happened. Was it a fatigue factor? Did we give (too many) people (time) off? Because the fireworks were Friday and Saturday. That's where we had a lot of folks deployed during those time frames.” He admitted the numbers of bodies taking rounds was unacceptable,

I wonder, what exactly would be an acceptable rate of ballistic intrusions on carbon foot-prints over a few hours in Chicago?  A real headstratcher that one.

Mayor Chicagoland was equally huffed and puffed about the numbers, the optics and the growth of ballistic corporeal intrusions over Independence Day Weekend.These guys are almost mildy concerned enough to actually give voice to what everyone else in Chicago knows?

Not a chance.
In April when the temperatures spiked after the long Arctic Chicago winter, so do did bullet gusts and Rahm said,

"Every child deserves a childhood, regardless of where they live. But to do that, our city and community, the neighborhoods that make up this city, cannot live by a code of silence," Emanuel said at a news conference at an Edgewater school to announce more international baccalaureate programs. "They have to live by a moral code."

"Now I've read some of this, and I just want to say this, when some people go 'Well, it's the weather.' It's whether you have values," the mayor said. "Yes, weather's an impact. Where you put police is an impact. Whether you have summer jobs, after school programs, camps, summer reading programs. We have to do that and more."

And By Jingo, he did!  In fact he said so in the wake of 4th July fussilades, "While [Chicago is] providing record summer educational job opportunities and summer jobs, where is the federal [government] with assistance to expand that?"

Rahm knows that After School Programs do more to stop bullets* travelling between 770 -840 feet per second than decking out an entire neighborhood in T-shirts and marching behind Reverends at Gun Shops, or posting STOP GUN VIOLENCE signage hither and yon in ballistic afflicted neighborhoods.

Certainly, After School Programs do much, much more than having a well-led, well-manned and well-backed Police Department unencumbered by showers of pissy lawsuits and pissier media smears of cops doing their jobs bolstered by the pissiest of academic frauds with pie charts and mythopoeic yarns of systemic racism, brutality and working class contempt in bringing bad guys, cut-purses and sundry ne'er-do-wells to book for actual crimes.

After School Programs, especially when school is out for the summer, will end the bloodbath and bring Robert Redford's documentary crews back for another clear-eyed look at this Shooting Gallery on the Lake.

Boy, and all this time, silly me, I believed it was due to the fact that vicious, self-absorbed, bone-stupid and well armed thugs feel that they can get away with murder in Chicago, because Rahm, Daley, the Alderpersons, Toni Preckwinkle, Northwestern's Wrongful Industry, G. Flint Taylor, Locke Bowman,  Loevy & Loevy, both newspapers' editorial boards and icon columnists, WTTW, Pat Quinn, University of Chicago, CPS and too many grant-making philanthropies have made Chicago A Thug Comfort Zone. Thugs of all ethnic origins are surely welcome like this Evergreen Park native, sporting the fine old Irish/Viking name of Magnan.  Perhaps, when he came home from the Tattoo parlor sporting the Message at the center of what passes for his forehead might have indicated the road less travelled but certainly most bloody.

Science, my boy, science!

* Square Rooting -"Last year saw dramatic improvements after a particularly violent 2012 when Chicago topped 500 homicides for only the third time in a decade. But the momentum has appeared to slow so far this year. Through Sunday, homicides have dropped 5.6 percent, to 185, 11 fewer than the year earlier, police statistics show. But shooting incidents have risen to 953, up 5.3 percent from 905."

** Bullets in metric conversion -
Bullet Mass = 10.2 grams
Velocity = 230 meters per second
Energy = 282 Joules 

Terry Sullivan and the Chicago Jazz Caravan -Sunday July 13th at Skokie Library ( 3PM)

Event Type: Jazz Performance at Skokie Library: Skokie Public Library, 5215 Oakton St, Skokie, IL 60077
Age Group(s): All Ages
Date: 7/13/2014
Start Time: 3:00 PM
End Time: 4:15 PM
Description:
The Chicago Jazz Caravan is a roving ensemble of some of
Chicago’s most seasoned jazz players, performing music reminiscent of
the great mid-century jazz supper clubs.

Tom Muellner is a respected Chicagoland jazz pianist and composer whom Neil Tesser, the nationally recognized jazz critic and writer for Playboy magazine, called “a pianist and tunesmith of stellar magnitude.” Although he has played drums, guitar, bass and organ, Tom’s natural preference was always the piano. He grew up hearing many great jazz recordings, but related particularly to the unique piano artistry of Erroll Garner. Tom came to an important milestone in his twenties by discovering the genius of the late jazz piano master Bill Evans.

Vocalist Terry Sullivan sang in early music ensembles and small concert choirs before turning to jazz. An Ohio native, she has a degree in flute from Ohio University, but began singing after college. Anita O’Day and Blossom Dearie are influences, among others. Ms. Sullivan sings in intimate venues in the Chicago area.

One of Chicago's leading jazz trumpet artists, Art Davis has been a busy performer and teacher in the city since the early 1980s. Davis has toured with Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, and Rosemary Clooney. As a charter member of the Chicago Jazz Orchestra (formerly Jazz Members' Big Band), he has appeared with Joe Williams, Kurt Elling, Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry and Nancy Wilson, among others. He has also performed with such notables as Maynard Ferguson, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Tony Bennett. Art holds degrees in Music Education (B.M., University of Illinois) and Musicology (M.M., University of Illinois). As a graduate student, he specialized in ethnomusicology with an emphasis in African music.

Bassist Jim Cox has been a full-time freelance musician in Chicago for the past thirty years. He studied double bass with Dr. Ed Krolick and Jon Burr at the University of Illinois in Champaign. Jim maintains an active performing schedule and teaches at three Chicago-area colleges. He is an accomplished orchestral as well as jazz player.

Library: Skokie Public Library
Location: Petty Auditorium
Contact Number: 847-673-7774

Jewish Novels, Berlin Airlift, Leon Uris' "Armageddon-A Novel of Berlin" and Preserving Our Memory

“To me, a writer is one of the most important soldiers in the fight for survival of the human race. He must stay at his post in the thick of fire to serve the cause of mankind.” 
― Leon Uris

Dr. Suzanne Gossett was a great teacher in the English Department of Loyola University when I was an undergraduates in the early 1970's   I had a course in the Jewish American novel and we read Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Phillip Roth and Henry Roth's Call It Sleep.  I loved Malamud, liked Bellow, detested Phillip Roth and found myself conflicted about the other Roth.  Call it Sleep took a kid by the name of David Schearl from the age of six into early adolescence - the tale is very much like James Joyce's early pages of Portrait of the Artist as Young Man in its imagism and sexual iconography - only in Yiddish, as opposed to Jackeen Dublinese.

The book is a compendium of fear boiling in a little guy.  He gets bullied by family, Reb Yidall his Hebrew instructor, older kids and, of course, a Catholic thug named Leo who gives David a rosary and rapes his little sister.

I presented my conflicts to Dr. Gossett, the novel is powerful and beautifully written, but seems dangerous.  David is a victim for scores of pages and is only freed somehow - Deus Ex Machina -by a step-father who relents from killing the boy and a mother who finally offers him some level of psychological comfort. Call It Sleep is an angst-addict's dope.  I countered Henry Roth with Leon Uris was not part of canon of Jewish novelists in the Loyola offering.

Leon Uris had not time for Freudian, Jungian, or Hegelian deconstructions and dithering.  Jews faced the existential reality of extinction.  Now, that is a problem.

Uris wrote about the common humanity that just might save not only Jews but stupid and self-absorbed planet full of carbon footprints.

Dr. Gossett assured me that, while Leon Uris sold millions books, wrote the screenplay to movies like Gunfight at OK Corral and others,  he was no Saul Bellow.  However, . . ." I could write a paper."

I did - got a B- and noted from my mentress " B'nai B'rith would love your point of view on the self-loathing Jew."   I used Armageddon and Exodus to counter Henry Roth.  Thin gruel. Armageddon and Exodus remain truly great reads. Exodus chronicles the birth of Israel in the wake of Holocaust and Armageddon the Berlin Airlift - contemporary to Israel's geopolitical obstetric agonistes.

This month marks the Anniversary of Berlin Airlift in 1948.  I believe that this event happened to be as much of an existential threat to mankind. The USSR and USA et al were at daggers drawn with blood lusts still up from the Second World War.  Gen. George Marshall and the hundreds of anonymous pilots and crews who flew food and fuel into the Soviet blockaded city of Berlin made Stalin blink.

Leon Uris gives humanity fair warning "It Can Happen Again"  and when it does everyone, not just the Jews, are fair game.

We, all of us, do not have  the time, the temperament, the memory or the luxury to self-loathe.

Identity Assasins in Academics - Even an African American Icon is Fair Game.

"…and by that crimson setting sun, peace come to Forest Glade, and of the Redskins, they was none, but history had been made…" Tully Crow (Lee Marvin)                                             

                                       

                                             “It’s banned, o’course” Flann O'Brien

Chick Fil-A makes some serious bird.  One of Chicago's most hilarious alderman, the ever hysterical hipster of the 1st Ward Proco Joe Moreno attempted to ban Chick Fil-A from selling its high quality poultry treats within the Chicago city, because the owners of the fried chicken outlet are devout Christians and do not accept the meme that Two Dads make a Marriage, unlike the current Sonic fast-food commercials and that  is thought crime in au courant Chicago values.

Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, no stranger group thought, heartily agreed with Proco Joe Moreno and in so doing insulted millions of Chicago Christians, Jews and Muslims, as well as fans of tasty chickens.  Chick Filay is cooking up a storm in Chicago - six days a week, because the owners honor the Sabbath.

No ban. Ban Fail.

 

Americans who subsist on a diet of bullshit, a huge demographic, continue to ban books, flags, crucifixes, opinions that counter to pop culture and HBO, octogenarian slum-lord NBA franchise owners who pillow talk stupidities to the skank du jour, traditional marriage, and the Washington Redskins. 

Redskins will be banned.  I wonder if Joe Kapp* is yet angry about the insensitive franchise that drafted him into the NFL ? Joe Kapp is a Native American. 

Anyone can be banned or have one's identity 'disqualified' and ultimately 'disappeared.'   It is the American Intellectual Way dating back to Brook Farm, Ralphie Emerson, Dave Thoreau, Dr. Lyman Beecher, William Lloyd Garrison, Jane Addams, John Dewey and Roger Baldwin.

Remember Booker T. Washington? John Carroll?  John Dos Passos? Commodore John Barry? Gen. James Shields?   Nikola Tesla?  Mary Harris Jones?  Of course not, as they have been all but effectively disappeared. 

Playing ball with the elite is progressive. Agree and do not disagree and everything will be just Jake.  It does not matter, one's level of achievement, valor, honesty, if the Gold Standard is violated a life, a book, an event is turned to lead by Progressive American Intellectual/Political alchemy.

Take Ralph Ellison, an African American author awarded the National Book Award when I was a wee baby.

Ralph Ellison was the subject of a biography that carved the dead Black up good and proper.  I read Invisible Man many times and students at Leo High School continue to read this singular novel.   Ellison was defended by none other than greatest living essayist of modern times, Joseph Epstein. Epstein took issue with the agenda Ellison biographer Arnold Rampersad.  Unlike so many Americans, Joe Epstein never dines at the All You Can Eat BS Buffet. Voila~!

The tip-off for the kind of book Rampersad has written comes in its blurbs, four of five of which are provided by writers who comprise the main body of the African American intellectual establishment in America: the literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., the biographer (of W.E.B.Du Bois) David Levering Lewis, the philosopher Cornel West, and the novelist Toni Morrison. (Where, one wonders, was Maya?) In his play Purlie Victorious, Ossie Davis has one of his characters say to another, "You are a disgrace to the Negro profession." This, really, is the charge, the organizing principle behind Arnold Rampersad's attack on Ralph Ellison: He was a disgrace to the Negro (now African-American) profession. Ellison would, of course, have understood, for there were few things he disliked more than the notion of black establishments and an African-American profession.
Here, without the tedium of his repeated charges, is Rampersad's bill of complaint against Ralph Ellison: He was an ungrateful son, a bad brother, a cheating and otherwise often cruel husband, an unreliable friend. He was a spendthrift (on himself), a cheapskate (when it came to other people), a snob, an elitist, an ingrate, ill-tempered; also condescending, disloyal, a sloppy, sometimes mean, drunk. Did I neglect to mention that he was a misogynist, pretentious, and without elementary sympathy for the young? And, oh yes, he was a boring teacher--though, for some unexplained reason, he failed to sleep with his students. Other than that he was not at all a bad guy.

I never thought Ralph Ellison to be a bad guy either so I took a look at an interview with Arnold Pampersad offered by Book Slut. 

It’s interesting to me that socially, at a certain point, he seemed to become interested in WASP patronage. In that respect, I don’t think he’s that different from certain Jews. In the book I [call it the] “platinum card of social prestige” associated with WASPs like Robert Penn Warren.. . . One thing that it could be said about Ralph Ellison and Jews is that he remained loyal to what he regarded as the best of Jewish culture to the end of his life. He never surrendered to any kind of anti-Semitism, even though his social climbings took him out of the world of Jews to the world of highly cultivated and wealthy WASPs. When Mrs. Guggenheimer, the person to whom he dedicated Invisible Man, died, he made a distinction between younger Jews and older Jews, who had known more suffering, who had greater difficulty in negotiating the territory between foreignness and Americanness and the old ways and the new ones. And he came down for the older people, who had paid a higher price for that negotiation of the American territory. That’s not a bad reflection on his part. It’s something a lot of people would sympathize with in seeing American Jewry.

Jews are the platinum card of social prestige? The WASP is the Gold Standard?  What valuation might Arnold Rampersad's semiotic hierarchy of valuation place an Irish Catholic from Chicago ?  Copper? Tin? Lead?

Among the many 'crimes' Arnold Rampersad indicts Ralph Ellison for future 'disappearnce' is the great man's refusal re- identify himself, much less allow snippy academic eunuchs to identify him.

:“Who wills to be a Negro?” Ellison says. “I do. I will to be a Negro. I’m proud to be a Negro.” Well, he should have recognized that many blacks could not say that and really mean it. I think he meant it. He believed in it. But they needed the therapy of the Black Power and black arts years in order to get a firmer grip on their sense of themselves and their belonging to America, even though there was a great deal of destructiveness that took place at that time. And I think, personally, that many people lost their way and might have been better served by being closer to Ellison’s definition of blackness or Negroness than the more volatile definitions that were emerging in the ’60s and ’70s.

How dare one? Easily, if you stands for something and refuses to fall for anything.

Well, ban me blind. 


*  Kapp was drafted in the 18th round of the 1959 NFL Draft by the Washington Redskins, who owned his rights to play professional football in the United States. After the draft, Washington did not contact him, so his only choice was to accept the offer from Jim Finks, the general manager of the CFL's Calgary Stampeders.

Breakwater Chicago? Nah, It's 'Mr. Lucky!' in Color.

The pitch for a floating entertainment center about a half-mile off Chicago’s shore is gaining the public’s support — and dollars. Chicago Tribune

Old Black and White TV had some great shows and one of my favorites remains MR. LUCKY - a saga of a Greek gambler and his Mexican pal who owned an off-shore Casino ship, where gaming and entertainment led necessarily to brushes with law enforcement and seedy underworld types.  The guy who played Mr. Lucky, a show based upon a WWII propaganda firm starring Cary Grant, was dead ringer for the dimple-chinned Old Cockney.  His Mexican pal was played by the great Jewish American actor Ross Martin.

Now, it seems that some guy from Plainfield, Illinois by the name of Beau D'Arcy ( I'd kill for that handle) is developing his own Chicagoland Mr. Lucky Playland.

D’Arcy’s plan includes a floating 300-foot vessel with sun decks, restaurants, a swimming pool and room for boats to dock. He told the Tribune last week he sees the project potentially being Chicago’s’ “next Bean,” a reference to Millennium Park’s popular Cloud Gate sculpture.

Back in the day, the music would be done by greats like Henry Mancini; dig this

 <iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/nXPzhg-xGMY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I shudder to think what Rahm Emanuel's Chicago would demand: Billy "Uncle Fester" Corgin?  Chief Keef?

Theme tunes aside, what about the opportunity for Fully Kreuzened Boaters to lose an outhouse full of personal savings>

I have no doubt at all that Mr. L. . .D'Arcy has already put the touch on the Illinois Gaming docents for a tour of the Byzantine hoops, mazes, and greased pigs necessary to obtain a 'gaming license.

Mr. Lucky's boat feature in both the movie and TV show was christened Fortuna.

Yes, I know the homonym problem all of us Chicagoans can be afflicted by - sound and sense.

' For Tuna?'  No, not the fish, nor the legendary south side political operative Tuna Carey.  Fortuna is Latin. ( Latin, noun Fortune). 

Well, it is Chicagoland!

Perhps Mr. L . . .D'Arcy's floating venue should be called Alosa pseudoharengus - Alewife.   

Why Americans are Silenced and by Whom - The Progressive Clerisy Explained by Joel Kotkin

Clerisy - Intelligensia - German Klerisei clergy, from Medieval Latin clericia, from Late Latin clericus cleric

Joel Kotkin is Casandra - that is if Casandra of epic Greek and Roman poetry looked like a dock-worker.  Joel Kotkin is a demographer ( studies the great American in his natural habitats: urban, rural and off-the -grid) more concerned with the living and breathing people of his study than the numbers that they represent.

I've been reading Joel Kotkin for years and every trend in population shift with underlying political and culture motor running them has been on the money.  Kotkin warned of the rise of the public sector unions, the titanium hand-cuffs of the welfare state, the Marxist control of immigration debate and the K-Street control of government back when Clinton was chasing interns through the cubicles and closets of the West Wing and few so-called political mavericks listened to his dire predictions.

Joel Kotkin clearly explained the gentrification of rust belt America as a signal accomplishment of Progressive hegemony.  The Smart Sizing of American cities is more about eliminating ethnic neighborhoods and opening up green-space for the elite than it is about meeting the challenges of a down-sized economy.

Somebody Else's Troubles is the meme of the New Progressive Millennium. The elites have their's - Up Yours, Dude.

The elites are the gated community of discourse and debate.  In his latest article published in New Geography reintroduced me to a word that I had forgotten from the time I took Father Charles Rohan, SJ's course on the Revolutions of 1848 at Loyola University in 1973.  That word is clerisy.  Kotkin offered clerisy in a previous New Geography articles on the eve of Term II Obama -

Like empowered bureaucrats everywhere, the clerisy also sometimes reserves a nice “taste” for themselves, much as the old bishops and upper clergy indulged in luxury and even prohibited pleasures of the flesh. Just look at the lavish payouts accorded to Orszag and Treasury Secretary-designate Jacob Lew, who, after serving in the bureaucracy, make millions off the same Wall Street firms that have so benefited from administration policies.
So who loses in the new order? Certainly unfashionable companies  – oil firms, agribusiness concerns, suburban homebuilders — face tougher times from regulators and the mainstream media . But the biggest losers likely will be the small business-oriented middle class. Not surprisingly Main Street, far more than Wall Street, harbors the gravest pessimism about the president’s second term.

These later-day-oligarchs  'wet their beaks' like Don Farnucci and do not countenance any nay-saying.  Telling the mass of folks to keep their opinions to themselves, to 'suck it up and salute,' demands a great deal of shovel-ready engineering and Obama's handlers have done just that in less than eight years and they ain't nearly done!

Kotkin is on it.

An alliance of upper level bureaucrats and cultural elites, the Clerisy, for for all their concerns about inequality, have thrived, unlike most Americans, in recent years. They also enjoy strong relations with the power structure in Washington, Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Wall Street.
As the modern clerisy has seen its own power grow, even while the middle class shrinks, it has used its influence to enforce a prescribed set of acceptable ideas. On everything from gender and sexual preference to climate change, those who dissent from the official pieties risk punishment.
This power has been seen recently in a host of cancellations of commencement speakers. Just in the past few months Ayaan Hirsi Ali, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde, and former UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, have been prevented from speaking by campus virtue squads whose sensibilities they had offended.
The spate of recent cancellation reflect an increasingly overbearing academic culture that promotes speech codes on what is permissible to say and even seeks to provide “trigger warnings” to warn students about the presence of nominally troubling subject matter in readings and discussions so they can avoid the elements of reality they find offensive.
The very term Clerisy first appeared in 1830 in the work of Samuel Coleridge to described the bearers society’s highest ideals: the intellectuals, pastors, scientists charged with transmitting their privileged knowledge them to the less enlightened orders.  

In Chicago, these bearers if society;s highyest ideals are retired terrorits like Billy Ayers and his odious Old Lady, Bernardine Dohrn, Hyde Park/Evanston  Mafia Dons like Abner Mikva, the late Dawn Clark Netsch, and the Red Dorain Grey Dr. Quentin Young, The Money - SEIU, Personal PAC Illinois, and Fred Eychaner This is the top of the food chain.

The level two elites are the elected officials academics, lawyers and activists, like G. Flint Taylor, Jon Loevy, Locke Bowman Craig Futterman, Thundering Dick Simpson of UICC and Martin Oberman Metra Overlord, the editorial boards and iconic columnists of both Chicago Papers and elected officials who do their biddings.

Third level elites are the qui bono go-alongs - investors, appointees, political debutantes in waiting.

Joel Kotkin warned that the fix was going in years ago with Casandra-like accuracy.  Remember, that erasing history and memory itself is essential to Progressive control - they will tell you what the 'right side of history, the climate, the fate of Israel, the minimum wage, the definition of marriage, the homicide rate, the fairness of everything and everything that "just can not wait, because we all have waited too long."

If you differ, you are

• A denier
• A hater
• A Palin
• A Flat-earther
• A Racist
• A Red-neck
• An Idiot
• A Catholic
• A Jew
• A Baptist

You will never be Bill Moyers, a member of CAIR, a Unitarian, or an NPR subscriber,    

Kotkin predicts ( and I have yet to catch him in error) that Clerisy is here to stay.

Will the Clerisy rule after Obama?
The fact that Republicans continue to maintain considerable power in both Washington and the states suggests that the Clerisy’s power is not yet determinative. And indeed after President Obama leaves office, the Clerisy’s reach may be temporarily diminished, but its ability to set the social and political agenda will likely persist and even grow given their influence to shape perceptions, particularly among the young.

 

What are you going to do about it, tough guy?

Rahm v. Preckinkle: Book Dodge Ball with Joe Epstein as Referee! Jimmy Fallon????

 

"Books are fun!" Just ask America's greatest essayist and literary critic-critic Joe Epstein!

I love books and I love getting nailed in the mush with dodge ball.  Books empower and dodge balls keep us on our toes.

Jimmy Fallon?  I guess he's pretty funny, but Jimmy could not get me to watch Bill Moyers, unless we were going to goof on that doughy mope's sanctimonious posturings on PBS, ala Mystery Science Theatre.

Rahm Emanuel, of CNN's Chicagoland and the Tonight Show Challenges, is Chicago Mayor who has done more to make the dim-bulb Progressive sour-puss Toni Preckwinkle seem like Frances Rappaport Horwich*  Toni Preckwinkle is former Chicago Alderman, former spouse of Zeus Preckwinkle and the current Cook County Board President with the personality of a dial tone and a room-temperature I.Q., I believe.

Rahm Emanuel took credit for Jimmy Fallon's March 2014 Polar Plunge in support of Chicago Special Olympics run by the witty, brilliant and painfully honest James "Skinny" Sheahan and is trying parlay that dubious ownership into a Tonight Show broadcast from the Chicago Theatre.  Rahm wants Jimmy Fallon to bring his show to Chiraq by dint of a promissory note from the Chicago Board of Education that Chicago Public School (CPS) children will read 2.5M books. That's allot of books.

"Here's our challenge: This year the kids of the city of Chicago, I challenged them to 2.4 million books to be read, and if they do it this summer we want you to bring the Tonight Show back to Chicago, it hasn't been since 1998," Emanuel said in a rare moment of pleading. "If they read it, will you do it, for the kids of Chicago?"
After Fallon tried to bump the number up to 11 million, Emanuel joked that a local accounting firm would handle the tally before saying, "2.5 million books, you can bring your show back to Chicago any time."
Fallon agreed, saying "I love to go to Chicago."

 Hey, who don't, Jimmy?

I read a lot of books and continue to do so, because my Mom and Dad read alot of books and I went to Catholic schools from K-20+ and taught literature in Catholic schools from 1975 -Present.

As a kid I read Captain of Ice , by Charles Spain Verral about twenty million times.

Book reports on this great read only got by the nuns twice.  Does Rahm factor distinct tomes into the wager's equation, or is he expecting any number of young scapegrace to read Diary of Wimpy Kid over and over?

Rather than get into the tall weeds of For the Kids legalese - why not offer a different challenge - Literary DodgeBall?

Rahm could go Mano a Mano with Toni Preckwinkle tossing unlimited literary volleys of question with retired Northwestern Literary Professor Joseph Epstein.

Each participant comes armed with an individual literary arsenal - Toni Preckwinkle once damned Nobel Laureate for Literature Saul Bellow as a racist.  I like to hear Rahm toss a dodgeball question like this -

• "CCBPresident Toni!  In one sentence, explain 'What exactly is Mr. Samler's Planet?' "
• " In the Canon of Bellow's racist tomes, Who exactly is __________ the Rainking?
• " Saul Bellow's imitation of James T. Farrell's south side trilogy is called The Adventures of Augie _________________, whom?"

Then having been pummeled, Smart as a Whip and former teacher and Hyde Park resident Toni could ask Rahm . . .hmmmmmmmmmmmm.  Let me see H'yar. Books, wait, wait, don't tell me.  Literary?

Man I'd pay to watch that and I'd bring a picnic basket chock full of eats from Manny's and something to read.

*"Frances Rappaport Horwich (born Frances Rappaport, 16 July 1907–22 July 2001) was the host of the popular children's television program 'Miss Frances' Ding Dong School.'"

First Lady Michelle Obama's War on White Privilege

 

So we know that when we rely on sound science, we can actually begin to turn the tide on childhood obesity. .  .  Right now, the House of Representatives is considering a bill to override science by mandating that white potatoes be included on the list of foods that women can purchase using WIC dollars. Now, there is nothing wrong with potatoes. The problem is that many women and children already consume enough potatoes and not enough of the nutrient-dense fruits and vegetables they need. That’s why the Institute of Medicine — the nonpartisan, scientific body that advises on the standards for WIC — has said that potatoes should not be part of the WIC program.  Michelle Obama, First Lady ( empases my own) 

Here is the racist alternative of "white" privilege.

The "white" potato, know today as the Irish potato, originated
in the Andean Mountains. In 1532 the Spanish arrived in north Peru
and it is speculated that they brought the potato to Europe in the
second half of the 16th century.(8) Because they were classified in
the same botanical family as the poisonous nightshade, potatoes
were thought to be poisonous and people refrained from eating
them.(9) Potatoes were considered a novelty and became fashionable
in the mid-eighteenth century when Marie Antoinette wore potato
blossoms in her hair. During the eighteenth century, the monarchs
of Europe discovered the nutritional value of the potato and
ordered it planted.(10) By 1800, the potato had taken root and
ninety percent of the Irish population was dependent on the potato
as their primary means of caloric intake and as an export.(11)
Since the famine, the Irish have expanded their diets; however, the
potato continues to be a dietary staple in 130 countries today,
including Ireland.(12)
     Potatoes contain nutrients, such as protein, carbohydrate, and
vitamin C, which are necessary for a healthy diet, but lack vitamin
A and calcium. Combined with milk, potatoes supply almost all food
elements required for a healthy diet.(13) To fulfill the daily
nutritive requirement in the mid-1800s, each person had to eat 3
kilograms (six and a half pounds) of potatoes. According to
historical accounts, a "burley farmer could down 15 potatoes" at
one meal.(14) 

OMG! White Privilege - white spuds - has made America's Kiddies Lard Asses? Why ?  White potatoes must be the racist Tea Party spoon foods.  The Irish, as we all know too well from film and the media, are intrinsically racist, until they abandon the Church of Rome for the United Church of Christ and Bill Moyers or become Unitarians.

Spuds are not only the cause of obesity but the food of white privilege.

I did not know that.  

Spuds kept millions of my people alive, until a blight wafted its way over the waves from the West Indies to west Kerry.  Tatters were in tatters from 1845-1847 and the subsisitence food that the scientists of  Perfidious Albion determined that Paddy and Bridget and the broods of bairns could keep making Galtee Cheese, butter and milk, raise hooved beef & swine and gather corn and wheat for export to Queen Victoria, Darwin, Karl Marx and  Fred Engels, as well as many Progressive minded men and women of sense and good nutrition -

“Here, then, under our own eyes and on a large scale, a process is revealed, than which
nothing more excellent could be wished for by orthodox economy for the support of its dogma:
that misery springs from absolute surplus-population, and that equilibrium is re-established by
depopulation. This is a far more important experiment than was the plague in the middle of
the 14th century so belauded of Malthusians… The Irish famine of 1846 killed more than
1,000,000 people, but it killed poor devils only. To the wealth of the country it did not the
slightest damage.” (Marx, 1867)

Big Government did what it could at the time for the spud eaters -

 “LVIII. And be it enacted, That every Person who shall refuse to be lodged and maintained in
the Workhouse of any Union, or abscond out of such Workhouse while his Wife, or any Child
whom he may be liable to maintain, shall be relieved therein, and every Person maintained in
a Workhouse who shall refuse to be set to work… contrary to the Orders of the
Commissioners, shall, on Conviction… be committed to the Common Gaol or House of
Correction, there to be kept to hard Labour for any Time.” (Poor Relief (Ireland) Act 1838,
www.workhouses.org.uk) 

The Potato Famine was a misnomer employed by men of sense and science to hide thievery and villainy of a Government that does not like people.  Studies were more valued, as they are in Obama's America, than common sense and that is why food left Ireland in great quantities, while Catholic spud eaters died up a storms or Effed Off to Yankland.

Potatoes could sustain life, but that food was denied -its white privilege erradicated.

So says, First Lady Michelle Obama. 

Shameful Things I Haven't Done

I am a deeply flawed man, a sinful man, a willful man, an arrogant man and a crabby man, given close to immediate proximity to jackasses in shoes and socks.

I have done many shameful things in my life.

But I have never

• Blamed it on the Bossa Nova'
• Partied like it's 1999
• Taken my Hat off to Larry
• Cried a Little, Before the Clouds Rolled By a Little
• Demanded that Rhonda Help Me.
• Checked my weapons at the Door
• Paid My Quarter
• Burned my Leather on The Floor
• Grabbed Anyone's Daughter
• Asked Alice
• Flew Down to Rio
• Gave Peace a Chance
• Played that Funky Music
• Rode the Pony
• Did Watusi, Like My Little Lucy
• Did Jerk, nor Watched Me Work
• Saw the Harbor Lights
• Took the A Train
• Drove by Mary's Place
• Lived in a Yellow Submarine
• Did Mickey's Monkey
• Thanked the Lord for the Nightime
• Day Dream Believed
• Booga-loo'd Down Broadway
• Took the Midnight Train Georgia
• Grooved on a Sunny Afternoon
• Sock'd it to Baby
• Dug Good Vibrations
• Went Off to See The Wizard
• Loaded 16 Tons
• Ferried Across the Mersey
• Asked the Lonely

These, I do not need to hangdown my head about and cry.  

Chicago Can Not Have a "Discussion" on Race, Unless It Includes the 1904 Meat Packers Strike

(Meatcutters in Chicago 1904 were proud and skilled workmen and they were causing the Packinghouse owners problems.)

Yet again Chicago is being challenged to another discussion of Race.  This particular discussion should result in a Federally funded lump sum payment to African Americans or a continued discussion of race.

“In the effort to uphold white supremacy at every level down to the neighborhood, Chicago — a city founded by the black fur trader Jean Baptiste Point du Sable — has long been a pioneer. The efforts began in earnest in 1917, when the Chicago Real Estate Board, horrified by the influx of southern blacks, lobbied to zone the entire city by race.”    talented writer quoted in Sun Times Editorial 

I disagree, respectfully - not 1917, Msr. Coates; rather 1904.

No serious discussion of race can or should take place in Chicago without its starting point - the 1904 Stockyard Strike.

Chicago has never recovered from the Meatpackers Strike of 1904. Though engulfed by flames in 1871, Chicago rose from its roots again like an oak forest on steroids. The Pullman Strike, put down by George Custer's replacements, Illinois Yellow-legs and Pinkerton's goons, was as nothing compared to what lay ahead on the tracks.

Chicago's steel tentacles pulled cattle, hogs, sheep and any other hoofed hide that could be tanned, eaten, rendered or husbanded to a vast yard owned by sharp men of business. The amalgamation of tanners, packers, renderers, and shippers had cheap, disorganized and willing pool of people to labor, bleed, and exploit - Czech, Irish, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Westphalian, Belgian, Prussian, Bavarian, Norwegian, and Swedish.

Some of those immigrants had skills as carpenters, millwrights, metal workers, coopers, cart wrights, and teamsters; most had no skills other than brute strength. Today they would be called Caucasian, though very few had passed through The Caucasus to get to America.

On July 12, 1904, a strike was called by the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen (AMC) whose President Michael Donnelly announced the strike.

The causes of the strike ranged from low wages to the excessive pace required while on the job. The strike lasted for nearly two months and included rioting and murder with few periods of peace. The strikers used tactics such as demonstrations and parades while the packers responded by hiring strikebreakers. Although factory conditions were unchanged, the strike had many far reaching effects on the city of Chicago, the union, and the nation as a whole. . . . The Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen played a major role in the strike. It was a giant organization and employed both skilled and unskilled workers, a circumstance often resented by skilled workers.(Halpern 32) Though unity was not one of the union's strong points, the union did give workers some sense of it, which was vital when the strike finally began. The main protagonists of the strike were the common laborers, the skilled and unskilled butchers of the Chicago packing plants. The workers, now somewhat organized, demanded higher pay and an end to the relentless "speeding up" of the packing progress. The typical laborer at the time of the strike was foreign, unskilled, worked long, hard hours, and was paid less than twenty cents an hour. The strikers were also very violent which resulted in numerous murders and riots. ("Strikers Firm" 2)

( Bow-tied Frank Curry was Hired by Armour, Swift and the smaller packing interests to bring African Americans to Chicago to break strikes)

(Frank Curry brought hundreds of men and women up from the south into caldron of labor strife - the race card would played later.)


(Chicago Police escorted Curry's strikebreakers ( black men and white men) to the yards) - south of Bridgeport - Irish Canaryville and the Eastern European Back of the the Yards)

The murders and riots were in reaction to the bringing of strikebreakers, mostly African Americans from the South and hired goons* to agitate and incite violence. Chicago Tribune archived articles from the period of the strike - roughly July through September 1904 bear witness to the actions and motives behind those acts.

 The Striking workers lived in and around the Stockyards - their descendants still do.

 Trolleys were hired to take strikebreakers to work

Strikers waited for scabs

Scabs came to Chicago in meat-packing rail cars and they were from all races.


( Strikers and their families starved)


The violence brought home to the heart of readers the intense frustration felt by the strikers and their families and the malice and greed that Chicago's leading families were willing to orchestrate in the name of profit. 8,750 strikebreakers, mostly miserably poor blacks, were lured with promises of a better life in Chicago and train fare to this abattoir of the human heart. Strikers and their families were in fact starving despite the effort of Strike relief Committees and the sympathy for strikers crossed state lines. However, the need to feed the greed was greater than articulating an agreement with the AMC. The owners intended to break this strike and they succeeded.

After a unanimous vote to maintain the strike, AMC President Michael Donnelly announced the strike ended on Sept. 9 1905 - 59 days after the strike was called.  Jane Addams and Dr. Cornelia De Bey helped to break the strike. That is another antipathy working people of Chicago developed after the 1904 Strike was broken - a complete mistrust and low regard for public reform icons.

The resulting antipathy between multi-cultural,lingual, and religious Caucasians and the strikebreaking African Americans would play out for next one hundred and two years in Chicago. The nature of race relations would always be reduced to the simple 'color of a man's skin' equation by people with the luxury of not being close to the conflict.

The descendants of the strikers would recoil from relations with the people who came North in the hope of a better life. They were shoved into combat with people themselves the victims of exploitation and those who profited by that combat. Those same descendants, one hundred and two years later, continue to be at odds with one another. The strikers descendants moved away as the Black Belt expanded to Berwyn, Cicero, Maywood and the southwest sides - places that since the 1904 strike have been branded as single-mindedly racist, unlike neighborhoods far removed from killing floors on the south side. The Armours and the Swifts and their co-industrialists did well by the strike and became clean with wealth, while the strikers and the strikebreakers were set at odds with one another and continue to be.

The horrific race riots of 1919 were confined to battlefields of Back of the Yards and the Black Belt. The fight for fair housing from the 1940's through the new Millennium mirror that combat zone. Dr. King marched in Marquette Park, where the descendants of the strikers lived and not in Highland Park where the people who prospered by that broken strike. South side white ethnic neighborhoods continue to be referred to as 'racial hotbeds' as recently as last week in the Chicago media. Blacks continue to be pitted against ethnic whites and exploited for political and economic gain.

Maybe, some talk about the causes and consequences of the 1904 Meatpackers Strike should preclude any 'Let's talk Race' challenge. Go and avail yourself of my sources listed below.

Sources: 
  Further reproduction prohibited without permission.All primary sources.

HUNDREDS COME TO BREAK STRIKE
Chicago Daily Tribune (1872-1963); May 2, 1904; ProQuest Historical Newspapers Chicago Tribune (1849 - 1985)

STRIFE ATTENDS PACKERS' STRIKE.
Chicago; Jul 13, 1904; ProQuest Historical Newspapers Chicago Tribune (1849 - 1985)

RIOTS AT YARDS; SEVEN MEN HURT
Chicago; Jul 18, 1904; ProQuest Historical Newspapers Chicago Tribune (1849 - 1985)
pg. 1

WORKERS STONED BY MOB OF 5,000.
Chicago Daily; Jul 22, 1904; ProQuest Historical Newspapers Chicago Tribune (1849 - 1985)

STRIKE IS ENDED; MEN SURRENDER.
Chicago; Sep 9, 1904; ProQuest Historical Newspapers Chicago Tribune (1849 - 1985)  N.B. - read Strike us Ended. very carefully